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A recurring motif runs through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches far back to the time of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.

A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the resourceful people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Even, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — to make money, needless to say.

There’s nothing inherently notable in a string of movies presupposing that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.

The Outlet That Changes Nothing

Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the news reveals constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and value to society, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.

Actually, it appears that the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a steady diet of mostly uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about good conquering evil. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will weed out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.

A Sharper Edge in 2025

Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."

The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.

Significant Exceptions

There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid